[Hiring] Data Engineer @CivicMarketplace

Role Description

Every city, county, and school district buys things. Roads, software, cleaning services, IT infrastructure. The total is somewhere north of two trillion dollars a year. And almost all of it moves through procurement processes designed for a different era: slow; paper-heavy; opaque and exhausting for everyone involved.

Civic Marketplace was built to fix that. We're a modern, data-driven platform where government agencies discover, evaluate, and engage suppliers. Where businesses, especially smaller and growing ones, can actually find and win public sector work without needing a dedicated contracts team to navigate the maze.

None of it works without data that can be trusted. Procurement is a data problem before it is a software problem: who the suppliers actually are, what they can genuinely deliver, which contracts an agency is already entitled to buy from, what this thing cost the county next door. That information exists, scattered across thousands of agency portals, state registries and PDF attachments, in no agreed format, and nobody has assembled it properly. Whoever does gets to define how public money is spent for the next decade. That's this role.

The hard part isn't moving data from one place to another. The hard part is that public procurement has no shared vocabulary. The same supplier turns up as four different legal entities across three registries, and two of the spellings are wrong. Commodity codes are applied inconsistently, or not at all. A cooperative contract one agency can buy from today is invisible to the agency next door because it was published as a PDF on a portal with no API. Every source you touch is incomplete, inconsistent, or both, and most of it is public record, so you can't quietly correct it. You have to model the mess honestly.

As we build out our agentic procurement capabilities, the reliability of that data, and how we prepare it for retrieval, becomes our most critical engineering challenge. So this is an entity resolution and data trust problem dressed as a pipeline problem, and it's yours to solve.

You would be our first dedicated data engineering hire, reporting to Mikey Mo, our Head of Engineering. Data work today sits with the product engineering team and gets done alongside shipping features. It works, but it belongs to whoever last touched it, and that isn't a foundation for what comes next.

This is a build-and-do role. You'd collaborate closely with our Head of Engineering to shape the architecture, and you'd also write the pipelines, carry the pager for them, and go and read the raw source when a number looks wrong.

Qualifications

• Data engineering experience in a startup or scale-up, where you've built the platform rather than inherited one
• Strong SQL and Python, and the judgement to know when the warehouse is the wrong place to solve a problem
• A data model you designed that other people had to live with, including the parts you would do differently now
• Real experience of messy external sources: half-documented APIs, flat-file drops, scraped pages, PDFs, and data you neither control nor can correct
• Entity resolution or record linkage experience, or clear evidence you'd be good at it
• A commercial head. You can tell the difference between a data problem that's blocking revenue and one that's merely interesting, and you sequence accordingly
• The instinct to find out why a number is wrong before proposing a fix
• The instinct to build systems that scale rather than pipelines that run once
• Genuine AI fluency
• The determination to stay positive through the ups and downs of a fast-moving startup
• Comfort operating remotely across timezones with real autonomy and not much oversight
• Curiosity about why public sector data is different

Requirements

• Govtech, public sector or civic tech background, or experience working with public records and open data
• Familiarity with supplier and procurement data: SAM.gov and UEI, DUNS, NAICS or UNSPSC, cooperative purchasing, COG or NIGP
• Experience with search and retrieval, whether OpenSearch, Elasticsearch or vector pipelines (like Pinecone or Milvus) feeding an LLM product
• Bilingual English and Spanish, especially valuable for supplier data quality and onboarding
• Experience being the first data hire on a team that had been doing it themselves

Benefits

• Competitive salary and early-stage equity
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Flexible PTO
• Remote-first, with real flexibility across timezones (Remote, USA; London, UK)
• Full AI tool stack: Claude Pro, HubSpot, Make, Notion, and more
• Regular team offsites, including international meet-ups
• Direct access to the founding team and a front-row seat to building something that matters

Company Description

Civic Marketplace, Inc is an equal opportunity employer. We actively encourage applications from candidates of all backgrounds, identities, and experiences.